Intentionality in Writing: Hendrika de Vries on Resistance, Feminism, and Telling the Truth

·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

De Vries connects truth-telling to activism and says her family’s resistance was not about blame.

The ad starts with hybrid memoir. Before the conversation turns to Hendrika de Vries, Valerie Isan points writers toward a memory class that can mix personal narrative with research, family history, cultural commentary, interviews, photos, or recipes. From there, the episode moves into memoir anxiety. The host frames the talk around intentionality, activism, and the uneasy moment when a personal story starts to carry political weight. Hendrika answers slowly and personally. She always wanted to write, but marriage in Australia, children, and ordinary life kept pushing the book away. Work gave the story another path. As a teacher and therapist, she used childhood memories as examples of resilience, strength, and getting through difficult times. These were not distant memories. She was a little girl in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, with a mother who hid a Jewish girl and joined the resistance movement. That history made the memoir harder, not easier. Hendrika knew the story had force and might help someone, but she also worried that writing it could feel self-indulgent. So the book waited. Articles came first. The larger project kept getting slowed by hesitation, guilt, and the strange pressure of claiming her own material. Then 2017 broke through. Seeing neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia made the memories feel urgent again, not just private or locally interesting. The craft question stays close to conscience. Intentionality is less about planning a message and more about noticing when lived experience comes with a responsibility. By the end, after all the circling around guilt, usefulness, and self-importance, the hosts land somewhere plain: stories matter.

As heard by us

Memoir, resistance, and the point where private memory becomes public record.

The conversation begins in memory, then opens into a larger question of how a private life becomes public history. The writer reflects on growing up in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, on her mother’s resistance work, and on the years it took before memoir felt possible.

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You want a memoir conversation about finding the right shape for a life story.

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